There has been a bit of nastiness going on in the Republican Presidential Primaries in Iowa. Someone has been push polling^* in Iowa and New Hampshire:

Among the questions asked during the 20-minute calls placed last week were whether the person polled knew Romney received Vietnam-era military deferments while serving in the Mormon missionary in France, that none of his sons served in the military and that the Mormon religion didn’t accept blacks as bishops until the 1970s.

Needless to say, push polling is sleazy, and when one adds the despicable pandering to religious bigotry, it gets worse.

Here, however, is where it gets weird, the calls are believed to have been made by Western Wats, a Utah-based firm closely tied to the BYU, the preeminent Mormon University in the world, and it’s hard to believe that they would do this, and threaten many existing business contacts.

The National Review^‡ looks into all of this, and mentions their pet theory that Romney did it so that he could play the victim.

I don’t think so. The downside of getting caught is just too much.

However, the number two theory makes sense:

According to another source at a rival campaign who wished to remain anonymous, there’s speculation that Romney may have push polled himself because his campaign wanted polling data regarding the negative perception of his Mormon faith for internal use. But since they couldn’t do so without causing controversy, they took steps to make it look like McCain.

^*A push poll is a phony poll, in which the goal is not to get information, but to place a bit of slander in the voter’s head, so they might ask something like, “Did you know that Matthew Saroff has a guilty plea for disturbing the Peace?”^†
†Actually, I do, it was pled down from the traffic infraction of an “improperly fastened load” so that it would not bump my insurance rates.
^‡They are professional liars. You need to confirm every period and comma.